The Pancyprian Organization of the Blind in a statement, condemns "the targeted ridicule of people with disabilities through games and "empathy" initiatives, which are superfluous and regress the legal status of people with disabilities", calling on the Ministry of Social Affairs and any competent authority that decides to organize events "for people with disabilities", to plan and implement them not without them, but with them.
The Organization states that the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Youth, decided "unilaterally and in the absence of the blind" to declare December as a "month of "empathy" for people with disabilities.
"Acting without the participation of these people themselves, they proceeded to take decisions and plan actions and initiatives, with results contrary and dangerous to their human rights, further widening their exclusion, through events that invoke the 'good' of people with disabilities, in practice humiliating their dignity in a provocative way," it adds.
It is noted that "the Education Minister himself, citing that supposedly the event 'will allow us all to understand what it is like to be able to play football when you are visually impaired', the only thing he understood, 50 years after the first official world blind football matches and 30 years of participation of the national blind football team of our country in international competitions and championships in Cyprus and abroad, is that 'children with visual disabilities can enjoy football, even with difficulties'.
"He even claimed that he held a football match 'with Paralympic football specifications', when this match was played in a way that did not even remotely meet these specifications, the 'blind football regulations were not applied and people without visual loss participated who were able at any time to lift the mask and use their eyes, largely creating conditions of mockery and ridicule," it added.
The organisation further states that "the match was described as a "'Unified Football Demonstration Match for Visually Impaired and Non-Visually Impaired Persons', which is a purely Cypriot invention to serve interests alien to those of the visually impaired persons to whom it refers. With events that have no trace of seriousness, where a minister posing as a blind person and pretending in front of the cameras that he is supposedly playing football with his eyes closed is making a mockery of visual impairment and attempting to ridicule blind people and their organisations.
Under the guise of "empathy", it says, the Ministry of Education does not respect blindness as part of human difference and diversity (a right under Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities). Instead, it is noted, it is "stealing and ridiculing diversity" in violation of a human rights-based approach and a prerequisite for designing sound educational policies in sport and providing learning facilitation services.
"It is no coincidence that ten years after the ratification of the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, this Ministry, through a series of decisions, refuses on a daily basis to design policies that are in line with it and the practical implementation of their inalienable, inherent rights. Instead, it remains attached to paternalistic concepts and anachronistic methods and practices that belong to 'dark' times in the history of visual disability," the statement concludes.
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